


spinning round in my brain

by Maple_Fay



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:05:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maple_Fay/pseuds/Maple_Fay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why?, he wonders, throwing himself onto his favoured chair and closing his eyes, the treacherous Mind Palace instantly overflow with memories of shapes, words, aromas and touches. Why now? (Not ‘why her?’; there could never be any other, a dark side of himself, as much a shady version of him as Moriarty has been, although in a completely different manner.) Why AT ALL?<br/>Three minutes, seventeen seconds later, the answer has already been formed, clear as day.<br/>He needs closure.</p>
<p>Post-3x02, a "closure" fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	spinning round in my brain

**Author's Note:**

> It's been two years and as many days (if I am not mistaken) since my first Irene/Sherlock fic, and my imagination, spurred on by the five seconds of bliss in the last episode, spat out this "little" thing. I hope you enjoy reading it, for which I am, as ever, deeply thankful.
> 
> Title from Billie Holiday's "You go to my head", because REALLY.

**_spinning round in my brain_ **

 

_Look at him. Do you think he’s solving mysteries even now?_

_Probably. He’s a genius, you know._

Bollocks.

He puts his collar up against the cold and the whispers, taking the stairs up from the Tube two at a time. A few more minutes and he’ll be safe, locked away behind doors and walls, far from the chaos, the questioning looks, the everyday hassle. His apartment is his fortress, the first hallway of his Mind Palace: the only place he feels at home nowadays. This is not an often encountered state, not since John’s wedding.

Mostly, he feels… betrayed.

No, _not_ by John. His friend met someone, fell in love, got married. Such is the way of the world, as far as Sherlock understands it. And frankly, Mary is all but a saint to be putting up with the ex-army doctor’s… oddities. Besides, they still work together. Their friendship is intact—well, as intact as it possibly could be, given that Sherlock has tricked and hurt John more than words can say. (Details, meaningless details. Aren’t they?) It’s not an outside breach of trust that’s left him feeling so… out-of-place.

It’s his own brilliant mind that has turned against him.

He closes the apartment door as quietly as he can, not wanting any interruptions, not even ones that come in the form of tea-bearing Mrs. Hudson. He needs to solve this, the greatest puzzle of… well, the last three years, he supposes.

He should be solving crimes.

He cannot afford to be distracted from his work.

Why did it _have_ to be London, the place where she’d decided to play with underage females of the royal family? Luxembourg would have been perfectly fine. Or Stockholm. Or wherever, as long as it was as far away from him as possible. She’d have had her fun, and he’d have kept the relative peace of his mind.

As it is, she pops up in the Palace at the most inopportune moments. Thankfully, he’s usually alone when in happens—and free enough to, well, _take care_ of the troubling vision. She gets dispersed easily enough, leaving a bitter aftertaste in her wake—something he’d learnt to live with long before the Belgravian scandal—and he’s free to go on with his life, solving crimes and being obnoxious and what not.

Now, however, the pattern has been changed. She has interfered with his thought process when he needed to stay _focused_ , needed to _work_. The slip frightens him, makes him lose his footing, grasping on straws in the darkness as he wonders—when is it going to happen again? (There is no ‘if’, that much is certain.)

It cannot be allowed to happen.

He’s not sure his mind agrees with that conclusion.

Why?, he wonders, throwing himself onto his favoured chair and closing his eyes, the treacherous Mind Palace instantly overflow with memories of shapes, words, aromas and touches. Why now? (Not ‘why her?’; there could never be any other, a dark side of himself, as much a shady version of him as Moriarty has been, although in a completely different manner.) Why _at all_?

Three minutes, seventeen seconds later, the answer has already been formed, clear as day.

He needs closure.

Saving her in Karachi was _not_ a proper ending, one that would allow him to put a figurative red stamp on the file and push it into the back archive of his mind, a place he rarely visits unless seriously pressed for data. Saving her ended in a smirk and a rushed ‘thank you, Mr. Holmes’, before she was off in a jeep and he proceeded with a thorough clean-up, meant to fool one Mycroft Holmes. Afterwards… it was as if she never existed in the first place.

Only, she _did_.

He didn’t think it necessary to look for her at that time. She’d left clues and hints for him before (how else would he know to go to Pakistan of all places, even before Mycroft did?), so a logical supposition was that she’d do it again, should she want to be found. The fact that she chose not to meant that she cut all the ties between them—or (an alternative he never willingly spares much thought) she’d been caught and killed before she had the _time_ to choose anything at all.

Which would, in a way, be a closure.

Not a desirable one (he can’t keep lying to himself, it’s said to have a bad influence on complexion), but a closure still. Which means—he needs to find out what happened to her. The woman, fresh and troublingly alive in his mind, though perhaps long gone from the physical world. He needs to play God, to find a confirmation—or, for that matter, a denial.

He knows what to do should the former turn out to be true. If the latter is—well, he’ll think about it when the time comes. No point in dwelling on the subject any longer than strictly necessary: she’s right before him when he does, smiling that smile he’s never seen on her face and doing surprisingly tender things he doesn’t suppose her to be capable of. And she’s always, _always_ , stubbornly and teasingly… out of any disguise.

Damned woman.

Tea. He needs tea. And nicotine patches. And, possibly, biscuits.

“Mrs. Hudson!...”

\--

Three weeks, seven hours, twenty-six minutes and eleven (twelve, thirteen…) seconds. Still no confirmation of Irene Adler’s death having taken place anywhere he has any kind of access to.

Which, by elimination, points to a conclusion that she is, in fact, very much alive.

Sherlock Holmes isn’t entirely sure how he feels about such a prospect. Especially since it poses further problems to be solved—problems he didn’t ask for, problems that make him splutter inwardly and spend far too much time pouring over old news of scandals and scams, searching for clues, any and all kinds of clues.

To make matters even more annoyingly complex, the odd slip-ups resulting in The Woman coming to the front of his conscious mind stopped being odd. They’re more of a regular thing these days. Unacceptable!

He’s got work to do. Lestrade and his team would probably keel themselves over without his help and attention. John needs a sounding board ever so often, going on and on about how married life is so much _different_ than simply living together with someone. Mary requires Sherlock’s company for the very same reason: both are rather easy on the logical and psychological level, but terribly time-consuming all the same. And then there’s his brother, middle age crisis hitting harder than he’s prepared to admit and making him even more insufferable than during the prepubescent era, impossible as it may seem. And _then_ there’s Mrs. Hudson, whose good graces he needs to keep up, now that he’s discovered the source of his morning tea. All in all, a busy, busy life.

And yet he spends about thirty-seven percent of his every day looking for her, and still gets nothing.

Absolutely frustrating.

He’s been through it all. Given that her Pakistani business went belly-up, Miss Adler would have done her best to disappear—somewhere heavily populated, quite exotic in cultural and social terms for both the British and the Middle-Eastern police: somewhere no one has heard of her—yet. After careful consideration, Sherlock decided on Hong Kong being the most plausible hiding place, and devoted approximately two and a half weeks to getting his contacts into motion, creating an elaborate explanation for his interest in a woman the likes of _the_ woman. His informants came up with nothing: a fool-proof, hundred-percent solid nothing.

Further options included Rio, Havana, and, reluctantly, New Orleans. Result: as described above.

Infinitely, absurdly _infuriating_.

He is left with scarcely more than a handful of ideas, which in itself is as troubling as things could possibly get. He paces his rooms up and down at all times: to the point when Mrs. Hudson threatens to murder him. (He’s pretty sure she wouldn’t know how to get on with it; still, she _has_ been around him long enough to pick up some of his methods, and the thought is a true blood-chilling motivator.) His phone never stops buzzing with alerts of suspicious activity in forty-nine different agglomerations around the world. And yet.

When the solution occurs itself to him, he all but jumps out of the window in relief. And, well, in shame for not having thought of it earlier.

Wrong. Kind. Of. Suspicious. Activity.

\--

What does one look for, then? His fingers pause over the keyboard as he frowns, the cogs in his head coming to a reluctant stop. He knows a lot about how people think, how they function (although it mostly doesn’t have much to do with the so-called human nature, as Mary cleverly pointed out the night they met): but this, _this_ is alien territory for him. Not an _alarming_ one, contrary to Mycroft’s beliefs, but an alien one all the same. The fairly innocent searches—her professional alias, a few definitions supplied by dictionaries—bring no measurable results, apart from making him sulk seventy-eight percent more persistently.

(Reasonably speaking, it’s best he leaves the matter alone. So he tries that, the man of logic he prides himself to be. Two days later, she appears when he and John are meeting a customer is a light and breezy sitting room in a well-to-do family house in West End: only because the sofa _slightly_ resembles the one in her Belgravian home.)

Back to the online search engines it is.

He tries less obvious options, “delayed gratification” and such. Still no use. He starts to feel it—the slight burning behind he eyes which he associates with defeat—and is about to admit that Irene Adler has, once again, bested him: when something occurs to him. A silly thought, probably very, very wrong.

Worth to try. He _is_ desperate: he needs this done with, and fast.

_What do I like?_

\--

_It doesn’t matter what you like and enjoy. We’re not here to judge you—only to help. Sometimes, help may take a form of an exercise you wouldn’t describe with such simple a word; regardless, the final result is the same: your release, and our professional satisfaction._

_Come and make an appointment at The Whip and Collar’s newest London venue now._

“The Whip and Collar”?

Is that a code name for the all-familiar “Rose and Crown”? Is there a members’ list, or a dress (undress?) code? How does one get in—and, more importantly, _out_?

And: how does he know she’s there in the first place?

He doesn’t. But he has to check, he _needs_ to try. If caring is a disadvantage, then Irene Adler might well be the greatest one of his life; not even worrying about John has ever made him so reckless, so… short-sighted. And if it’s _not_ a disadvantage, well—he’d better find her anyway, correct?

The logic of his thinking is quite sound and solid, even if he does say so himself.

\--

“What will you be doing next weekend?”

“Why?” he asks from behind his newspaper, lips pressed into a thin line as his shoulders tense imperceptibly. It’s rather usual for John to be onto him, but this is Mary asking: she that can see right through him and recognize a lie from a mile off. He quickly recalls the past three days, checking whether his behaviour has changed ever since he’s made the “appointment”: he cannot find any flaw to it, but the very perception might be flawed, as proved by former experience.

This time, however, the luck seems to be on his side. “No reason,” Mary shrugs, making herself comfortable on the sofa and patting her gently protruding belly: an unconscious gesture she picked up several weeks ago. “We were going to take a train down to the coast, get some fresh air. Want to come with?”

“Pass,” he mutters, hiding relief behind a smirk, behind a newspaper. “I’ve some experiments to run.”

Which, technically, is the truth.

\--

He frowns at the mirror, looking himself over critically. The clothes (crisp white linen shirt, stiff collar; charcoal grey suit; scarlet scarf replacing his customary navy one; Italian leather shoes) and appearance (hair sleeked back, a matter-of-fact expression) he chose seem to match the persona he’d created for himself using an online form (John Hamilton—although the name didn’t appear to be as important as various body measurements he was required to provide—a beginner aficionado of the lifestyle, seeking professional advice and recommendations). Naturally, none of this is going to fool The Woman, should she all but lay her eyes on him—however, he’s still working with his mind opened to the possibility of a mistake having been made. The logic was solid, there’s no doubt as to that:  and yet, she might not be here. After all, London is not the safest place for one Irene Adler, presumably deceased,  to be living in. Not that such a minor detail might stop her.

He takes a cab to the vicinity of the venue—an elegant, yet discreet-looking establishment in a slightly less-than-top-notch neighbourhood. Pays the driver in cash, pretends to walk further down the street before turning back and approaching the door purposefully. The front desk hostess is a woman of twenty-four to twenty-nine (hard to pinpoint due to heavy make-up), polite yet fairly cold: probably a standard in this line of business. Another young woman takes his coat, along with the scarf and jacket, and leads him down a dimly lit corridor with thick mahogany doors leading off to several rooms on both sides. Every visible surface has been sufficiently soundproofed, and discreet security cameras incorporated into the woodwork and the top of velvet-papered walls. Whoever established this… club, has been exceptionally thorough.

Inventory: check. Intelligence gathering: in progress.

“Is there a… common room, if you will?” he asks, following the hostess at a leisurely pace. The woman turns to him, smiling pleasantly yet not without a shade of sarcasm.

“As a rule we do not provide group activities, sir. All our clients arrive and depart separately at carefully measured intervals, to minimize any chance of indiscretion. Should you desire bigger company, sir, you’re welcome to invite a larger party or choose from our staff—however, we do not encourage fraternization between guests. This isn’t exactly a place for meeting potential golf partners or business associates.”

“Quite so,” Sherlock agrees with a tight-lipped smile and remains silent until the hostess stops in front of a door and hands him a perfectly ordinary, logo-less key card.

“Your first session has been scheduled for three hours, and shall include a detailed interview as well as practical application of accessories and… methods, mutually agreed upon between yourself and your handler. Since you haven’t specified otherwise, we’ve arranged the company of an experienced female for tonight. Any further requests in this regard will be duly noted and accommodated to during future sessions, provided that they do not stand in opposition to British law and common decency. Is everything clear, sir?”

“Perfectly,” he replies, noting with unease a slight quickening of his pulse. The hostess nods and steps away from the door.

“Very good. Your handler should be arriving soon. Make yourself comfortable, sir, and enjoy your visit at The Whip and Collar.”

As she retreats to the reception area, Sherlock opens the door, separating with a soft ‘click’ and revealing a room which he surveys with a certain amount of curiosity. There’s a bed in the centre, obviously, seven-by-seven foot and dressed in reds, velvet and satin; four bedposts; separate canopy, currently folded under the ceiling with a complex block-and-levers mechanism and thus revealing a large, square mirror over the bed itself. Two plush armchairs and a side-table line the wall to the left, the one with a door his “handler” shall most probably use. To the right of the entrance, a glass display case catches Sherlock’s eyes with its wide assortment of.. accessories. He steps closer to the glass, adding to his mental catalogue a variety of masks, collars, belts, suspension devices, handcuffs, chains and so forth—including a group of objects meant to be used rather than to _adorn_. Everything looks tailor-made, and approximately his size: which makes the “measurements” section of online registration form much more relevant.

He’s studying a pear-shaped object, seemingly made of heavy plastic, when the door behind him opens with a whisper, and a whiff of perfume touches his nose. “Well, well. Not _quite_ what I had in mind when I said ‘dinner’, I admit—but I’m certainly not complaining. Good evening, Mr Sherlock Holmes.”

“So it _is_ your club,” he mutters with a proud grin—one that quickly fades as he catches her reflection in the glass. Swallowing around a sudden tightness in his throat, “How did you know it was me?”

“You’re not the only one paying close attention to measurements,” she replies softly, turning to the table and opening a minibar in the wall above it. “Drink?”

He nods, pretending to study the display while in fact his eyes are fixed on _her_ : the out-of-focus reflection in the glass, dark hair piled haphazardly on the back of her elegant head, luminescent skin, blood-red lipstick matching lace dress with a neckline plunging so low it should probably be called “waistline”: exactly how he remembered—from Belgravia, not from Karachi. She’s lost weight, at least an inch and a half around her hips, he notices and frowns, quite despite himself: he’d have to make adjustments when approaching any encoded device of hers from now on.

Irene looks up, her eyes sparkling with something that’s not _exactly_ merriment. “Well now, Mr Holmes.” She places two glasses of red wine on the table, sits down with her legs crossed primly at the ankles. “What is your purpose for being here?”

Sherlock turns slowly, clasping his hands behind his back, not moving to join her. “Frankly speaking, it has already been fulfilled. I wished to see whether you were the one behind this… establishment. Apparently, I was correct to assume so. If that’s all the same with you, I shall take my leave now.”

(A pawn moves across the board, one space.)

Irene sighs with an overly theatrical manner, reaching for her glass and taking a tentative sip, not waiting for Sherlock to pick up his wine. “I wish it could be that simple, Mr Holmes. As my colleague has undoubtedly informed you, this facility is known for its flawless operation system preventing any identity leaks or indiscretions. In other words,” another sip of wine, slightly longer this time, “you are not allowed to leave this room until your time is up.” She puts the glass down and narrows her eyes in a way that makes Sherlock grip his wrists just a _little_ tighter. (A rook follows the pawn.)

“We may spend this time talking—although it does seem to me a terrible waste of… resources. Or, we could try to abandon our usual ways, and _communicate_. The choice, Mr Holmes, is yours. What is it going to be?”

(White knight joins in, jumps ahead.)

“I think I’ll start with the wine. If you don’t mind.”

“Certainly not. Despite the popular belief, you, Mr Holmes, are the only person that can _force you_ to anything in this particular environment.”

He cannot say he feels more at ease, per se, but he manages to cross the room and sit in the other armchair without showing any signs of weakness or hesitation. (The black knight prances forward and sideways, waiting for an opportune moment.) “You said you recognized me—from the information I’d provided. If you hadn’t done that, would I have met somebody else tonight?”

“Most probably. These days I hardly ever devote my time to… customer service, if you will.”

“Should I be flattered, then?”

“You tell me.”

(The white pawns are working on closing the ranks, doing a very good job protecting the most important assets. A bishop hovers on the outskirts of the battle, ready to strike.)

\--

“If I were any other client, what would you do?” ( _To me. With me._ )

“Talk, first. Communicate, second. Try to create a bond, eventually. Perhaps not tonight. Later on, if we both felt the potential.”

“It sounds quite a bit upscale, compared to your previous… endeavours.”

Irene smiles, fingers dancing around the rim of her glass. “Not as upscale as you might think. The basic principle is always the same. The difference lies only in resources, and in time that we can spend together. I’m not in any hurry. Neither are you. It’s the greatest comfort we can offer each other.”

“Those things,” he waves a hand at the glass display case, “would you have me try them on? Would you have used them yourself?”

“If I felt we were both comfortable with the idea, yes.”

“Both? I thought this is what you _do_. Aren’t you supposed to be doing this on a daily basis?”

“Do you take every case from every client that knocks on your door?” (Check.)

“Are you trying to tell me that what we do isn’t all that different in the end? Such a cliché from you, Miss Adler? I’m deeply disappointed.”

“No, I don’t believe you are. And yes—when you strip our chosen ways of professional conduct off all the external layers, what remains is the knowledge of facts. What makes a person tick. What gives a murderer away. To know these things is to have the upper hand, Mr Holmes.”

The wine buzzes pleasantly through his veins, and it must be blurring his mind in some way, because he cannot quite believe the words that spring from his mouth:

“What can you say about me, then? What kind of… entertainment would I enjoy at your hand? What _contraption_ would you employ to bind me?”

Irene smiles like the cat that ate the cream, and stands up slowly, the lace shimmering over her skin like ice particles in the water about to freeze solid. “Only the one you have already named.”

He frowns, eyes fixed upon her as she moves purposefully towards him, sitting on the arm of his chair, so close that he can smell her skin and taste her perfume in his mouth, bask in the warmth with which she resonates, but never touch, not yet, perhaps not at all. “I haven’t named any of those things,” he protests, waving dismissively at the glass case. (His arm comes back to its previous resting place, a tenth of a millimetre closer to Irene’s skin. Another pawn limps shyly forward.)

“You are still under the illusion that we would actually need any of them.” (He can see the black queen waking up, ready to step forward, and there is nothing he can do about it. He’s not even sure he wants to.)

“Wouldn’t… we?”

She laughs—a quiet, yet vibrant laugh that nests somewhere beneath his solar plexus like a hot unidentified virus, burning flesh and boiling blood in his wake. “I’ll share a secret with you, Mr Holmes: although it is as much mine to share as it is yours.” She bends down, her teeth all but scraping the skin off his right ear; he’s tense like a bowstring, ready to snap at the lightest touch, but she already knows that. “These… trinkets, that you seem so fascinated by—they are just this. A way of channelling fascination, of letting the secret rivers run loose over dams and down the ravines. We _could_ play with them, you and I, utilize them until we found every way in which we could make each other suffer in ecstasy. But it wouldn’t help us get rid of the problem.”

“What problem?” he manages to whisper hoarsely, his throat uncomfortably tight: this is _not_ what he was planning to do, _not_ how he was planning to _feel_.

“You know very well. You think about me, Mr Holmes, in the most inopportune moments. I know that because, regrettably, I do the same. And it cannot continue the way it has these past few years. We both have our lives to lead, provided we’re not pretending to be dead at a given moment.

“You didn’t come here to play with secret desires, Mr Holmes. You’re here because you need to _remember_ me—so that you can forget.”

He looks up into her eyes, dark and serious and betraying a multitude of emotions he doesn’t care to name, in fear that it would make _his_ eyes reflect them. “Is it possible? To forget, once we remember?”

Irene shrugs one shoulder: an elegant move that makes the red of lace shimmer down, baring the white of skin before Sherlock’s eyes, inches from his parched, parted lips. “Do you have a better idea?”

\--

If he is a phoenix, then she’s the funeral pyre on which he dies, turned into ash from which she emerges, only to burn back into nothingness.

The time is limited, but suddenly it does not matter. He’s not sure whether she’s timing this, or maybe she’s used her influence to ensure their privacy even after the prescheduled ending time of this rendezvous. He’s not sure whether it matters. There are far more important problems to focus on.

For instance, how to get her out the confines of lace, without damaging it? (He’s quite convinced the game would end immediately after the lace was ripped.) A trick question, it would seem: but one that, strangely enough, presents him with countless possibilities he hasn’t considered before.

For instance, he never gave much thought to Irene’s reaction to purposeful licks and sucks he delivers, hard enough to mark the skin but not violent to the point of breaking the intricate fabric covering it. Naturally, once he descends to the place that gives him best vantage point to familiarize himself with her breasts, his own shirt has long been discarded, so he himself can’t become a subject of such a detailed action-reaction study, but there are other areas that seem to particularly interest Irene at the moment. Her left heel digs firmly into the muscles of Sherlock’s back, holding him in place as she twists her body in his embrace (not enough to break the lace, never enough for that), helping his explorations along. He tries and experimental bite, and Irene’s fingernails dig into his back, making him groan at the sensation: the sting that’s not exactly unpleasant. He pushes forward, lower and closer and bolder as her hips cradle his body like a canoe, a raft in the middle of a roaring current, deadly and fascinating and dangerous and beautiful all at once.

Finally, he gets to a place where all that lace gives way to scraps of satin, and spends quite a while there, remembering, as the last bits of brilliantine from his hair end up between Irene’s fingers and down his shoulders, and then on his own cheeks as she pulls him back on, down his chest as she flips them, breathless and perhaps quite a bit furious with him, but—he figures as she growls into his hip, a wildcat in red and black—not _entirely_ disappointed, doing her own round of remembering and raising flames beneath his eyelids.

It occurs to him, after an indiscernible amount of time has passed and the red dress is finally discarded to the floor, undamaged, that they are both the river and the lace, intricate and wild and untamed and strangely fragile when dealt with by people who do not recognize their actual structure, don’t see the way they’re built and what makes them who they are.

They’re the same, he thinks, returning to her mouth full of secrets and lies and the taste of him, primeval and bitter-sweet like the sweat gathering in the corners of her forehead where her make-up spilt down to. They’re perched on the equivalent ends of two powerful magnets, always pushing the other away despite the instant recognition of similarity. They’re not meant to be together, not outside this room where the polarity has been temporarily reversed so that skin could meet skin, intricate patterns of lies, deceptions and countless little quirks intermingling, fitting together for a blessed moment or two.

There are many ways they fit, but the one that brings them closest together, close enough for him to swallow her gasp and for her eyelashes to draw mascara patterns on his cheekbone—is by far the best.

She teaches him the tempo and the distance, the strength and all the angles, and he remembers: remembers to forget, never to recreate it in frustrating hours before dull grey dawns, when his own fist is both his greatest blessing and his foulest curse. He knows now, is quite painfully sure, that this game ends in a stalemate, that nobody wins and neither of them will be free of untimely memories, of mental distractions and fantasies that shouldn’t take place. They will always be each other’s undoing, the one thing to catch them off-guard, the exception that proves the rule.

A high functioning sociopath and a dominatrix enter a soundproof room.

The joke is on them.

\--

“Well, then.”

There’s no need to comment on the complete and utter failure of a potentially flawless plan, not when his voice strings are still vibrating with the remnants of a scream and wide patches of her skin are covered in perfect replicas of the lace she wore.

“Quite so.”

The silence stretches, and they slowly drift apart, first to the opposite sides of the bed, then out of it, searching for lost articles of clothing and shards of sarcasm to build their fences back up with. It’s too late now: the breach has been made, the first drop fell down onto the stone and found a tender spot that could, with time, be softened and reshaped.

(Neither of them would admit to being the stone, as opposed to the droplet.)

They meet again in the middle of the room and simply look at each other; a look that doesn’t say: I know where you live, but rather—you know how to reach me if you ever need to. And you _will_.

There is no winner, so nobody takes it all as two pairs of doors discreetly click shut.

But perhaps, Sherlock muses as he retrieves his outerwear from the silent desk clerk, neither of them has lost quite as much as they’d feared they would.

(The board is reset. Blacks will start the next game.)

**End**


End file.
